Price: £225 Manufactuer: OCZ Technology
Supplier: OCZ Technology

If you plan on doing some overclocking with your swanky new Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 system, you're going to need some high frequency ram to make things fly. A few months ago and you would have had to splash out a small fortune on decent DDR2 but with prices falling, there's no excuse to skimp on this essential component. The OCZ DDR2 8500 Platinum Edition Dual Channel Memory kit is pretty much as good as it gets. SLI-ready with EPP (that's NVIDIA Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) to optimize the modules’ performance on nForce® 590 SLI-based motherboards) and the trademark XTC thermal heatspreaders that have become a feature of OCZ memory, are two of our favourite features. Throw in guaranteed booting at 1066MHz DDR2 at 5-5-5-15 timings, overvoltage protection to 2.4volts, SPD programming to take out all of the guesswork and OCZ have ticked all the right boxes on paper.

The modules ooze build quality but if you don't believe us, here's some eye candy.

The famous polished XTC heatspreaders with honeycomb design incase the memory in platinum mirrored splendour. If you're into modding, these are still the best looking heatspreaders on the market. Period! It's not just about looks either. The design actually increases performance and stability.

"XTC (Xtreme Thermal Convection) heatspreaders optimize the thermal management of memory modules by promoting greater airflow by means of micro-convection throughout what is usually the dead air space inside conventional heatspreader designs. In this manner, build-up of heat is avoided and thermal dissipation of the memory components is offloaded more efficiently through the honeycomb design. At the same time, mechanical stability is maintained."

A brilliant idea, simple and one that works. Other memory manufacturers must be kicking themselves for not thinking of this - the best that Corsair could come up with was flashing lights on top of the heatsinks!

OCZ know that enthusiasts who buy their memory want to overclock. Overclock, perhaps torture would be a better word. You buy PC2-8500 memory because you want to run it at DDR2 1200MHz. OCZ include an EVP (Extended Voltage Protection) - a feature that allows performance enthusiasts to use a VDIMM of 2.2V ± 5% without invalidating their OCZ Lifetime Warranty. With extra volts comes extra performance and with the juice turned up you will be able to squeeze every last drop from your system without having to worry about clouds of smoke or invalidated warranties.

The specs read as:

 

• 1066MHz DDR2

• EPP 5-5-5-15 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)

• vailable in 2GB (2x1024) dual channel kits

• Also available in a 1GB module Unbuffered

• Platinum Mirrored XTC Heatspreader

• Lifetime Warranty

• 2.1 Volts 240 Pin DIMM

• Special Features NVIDIA® SLI™ certified 2.4V EVP

On paper, the specifications are enough to make any processor drool with desire. Performance results after the click.

At 2.4volts, overclocking at 5-5-5 timings proved to be particularly rewarding and surpassed the OCZ Titanium VX2 modules we recently tested at 1218MHz. Due to the way the memory strap works on the Asus P5B Delux on speeds above 400MHz FSB a reduction in performance was actually noted at 1218MHz on the memory benchmarks in Sisoft Sandra. For this reason, we backed off to 400MHz FSB and 1198MHz for the memory and hit Sisoft Sandra scores of 8096KB/s in the memory benchmark test. We could have dropped the multiplier of the processor and pushed the memory further but that would have defeated the overall advantages of running the processor at 3.6GHz. Overall system balance is far more important when overclocking.

The OCZ Platinum modules seemed to prefer being overclocked - in fact they practically begged for it.  The only thing they didn't like was having the TRAS reduced from 15 which created blue screens of death no matter what voltage we pumped through them.

Moving on to tighter timings we found them to be full of suprises. At CAS 4-4-4-15 we managed a very sweet 1125MHz which catapults this kit into number position as the best DDR2 the MaXit Monsta has sampled. The very tighest timings we could manage were 4-4-4-10 at 900MHz.

Sisoft Sandra was used to measure memory performance of four different DDR2 samples - Corsair XMS2 8500, A-DATA Vitesta 8500, OCZ Titanium Alpha VX2 8000 and the OCZ 8500 Platinum Edition memory. At stock speeds and the memory strap at 1066MHz little performance difference was seen between the modules.  Overclocking the system up to  it's maximum saw the fantastic performance gains we'd already seen previously on the Titanium VX2 memory. The OCZ Platinum modules just pipped the OCZ Titanium VX2 to the post. Unfortunately, Corsair and A-DATA were not able to keep up in this extreme test.

PROS

• SLI Ready with EPP
• Over voltage protection
• Safely runs at 2.4volts
• Extreme overclockability
• SPD 5-5-5 at 1066MHz
• Lifetime warranty
• Best headspreader on the market
• Great looks

CONS

• ... Okay it's still £200+
  

Special thanks to OCZ Technology for supplying this sample. For more information on their entire range of products, head on over to http://www.ocztechnology.com